Dotless Domain Names Prohibited, ICANN Tells Google

New submitter gwstuff writes "Last year, Google filed applications for about 100 top level domains. These included .app, .cloud and .lol, but perhaps most prominently .search, which they had requested to operate as a 'dotless' domain. [Friday], ICANN gave their verdict on the idea that would make this URL valid : NO. Here is the formal announcement, and a related Slashdot story from last year. So that's that. But it may still be granted the rights for the remaining 100. Is prime dot-com real estate going to become a thing of the past?"

Comments

.com is still king

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't matter what other TLDs are announced. .com is still king for consumers, anything else is a just a toy for the nerdy.

Re:.com is still king

[alphatel]

doesn't matter what other TLDs are announced. .com is still king for consumers, anything else is a just a toy for the nerdy.

Your statement is correct but a bit too understated. I would add the following

It is very hard to get people to switch. Even the new internet generation that has no particular preference for .com or .other are hard won when trying to get them to change their defaults. If you tell someone to go to a website they either search, or type in the name and add .com (and an immense number of searchers type the .com part of the domain into the search box too).

Everyone knows you could have another extension but it's not their first choice. .ME and .CO were probably two of the biggest recent TLD launches. You can still pick up a premium in either of these extensions for micro-pennies on the .com dollar, registrations are still less than .1 % of total .com, and the US by far outregisters more domains in all extensions than all other countries combined.

Lastly, consider that ICANN is definitely the most inept entity in existence. As long as they keep the US Govt happy, they will always continue to run the rest of their org as a stupendous dung heap. This whole game of rolling out new TLDs will take them at least 5 years, and that's not counting all the supreme screwups that are sure to make the process less and less tasteful for those inside and outside the market.

Given these factors, I would say that .com will be king, for 20 years at least. Yes you can launch "help.apple" or "game.app" and get some traction, but anything less than the uber-premium word is going to have much less draw for an exceptionally long time. If nothing else but due to the way US consumers are trained en masse. You need to start a whole new brainwashing program to rewire people and I don't see anyone coughing up a few billion for that ad campaign anytime soon.

Re:.com is still king

[eggstasy]

I can't remember the last time I entered a URL manually. What is this, 1994?
I often type in a single letter and the browser autocompletes it for me.
If I don't know the exact URL, I type something in anyway and Google will look it up for me, at which point it will be saved in my browser history.

Re:.com is still king

[Zemran]

For example, how many American companies apply for .us domain? The other side of the coin is that you are only talking about the English speaking world. In Poland people want a .pl domain because customers know that the site will be in Polish. This is also true with most other languages. Obviously these are not nerdy but still niche. As for .search stupid now we have the omnibrowser or whatever you call it where I just enter the search string instead of a URL.

Re:.com is still king

[AHuxley]

The fun part is .com is now understood to be .nsa.
Will other cute words just be part of the same legal and cryptographic trap?

Re:.com is still king

[nurb432]

Today.

Who knows how it will be 20 years from now. Especially since the 'rules' are pretty much out the window now of what goes where. ( other than .gov of course )

Re:.com is still king

[petermgreen]

For example, how many American companies apply for .us domain? The other side of the coin is that you are only talking about the English speaking world.

Heck he is probablly only talking about the USA

Over here in the uk .co.uk is pretty commonly used. Sometimes .com will take you to the right place too but other tines it will take you to a foreign company of the same name or for multinational companies to the american website of the company in question.

Re:.com is still king

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

I can't remember the last time I entered a URL manually. What is this, 1994?

Err, how about the first time you visit your bank's Online Banking subsite?

You know the way they tell you in the introductory letter to enter the URL manually and as written in the letter? There is a reason for that.

Just a shame they don't print the signature of their SSL cert in the letter, too.

Re:.com is still king

[mwvdlee]

doesn't matter what other TLDs are announced. .com is still king for consumers, anything else is a just a money grab.

FTFY

Re:.com is still king

[alphatel]

...Given these factors, I would say that .com will be king, for 20 years at least.

Trying to make predictions on human behavior on the internet is pointless and for fools. 20 years ago the masses all thought AOL keywords was the only way to search. We've come a LONG way since then, along with a few game-changers along the way (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, smartphones) that change how people act and interact completely with the internet.

All it would take is another game changer to nullify your statement completely to modify behavior like this. We already don't type FQDNs in favor of being lazy and typing a single word into the search bar that is (now) built into every browser instead of having to actually go to your favorite engine search page and type it in. Yet another example of how behavior has modified itself rather quickly. How long before voice commands take over completely? You really think it's going to be 20 years before I'm just speaking a single word into a smartphone to find something? Oh wait, I forgot, we also do that today.

You make bright, salient points, which in contrary to your statements, indirectly validate the concept of .com strength.

When AOL was launched, it was "going to create a whole new internet". They had their own browser, interface, portals, etc.

Smartphones were going to replace all of that silly typing, Siri was the next generation's voice.

Facebook and Twitter did away with the need for any other way of communication, your profile was the place to be and eradicated the internet as a whole.

Every one of these were internet-killers. World changing, revolutionary, mind-numbing behavior modifiers. In the end they are all nothing next to the concept of free internet browsing, with your own browser, your own limitless mind and your exceptionally mindless searching which brings up whatever result has the most cash behind it. And since big companies (all of the examples above used .COM to make their stand), tend to stake the same horse, you will have it this way for a long time.

I am going to make one possible exception however. Govt spying on all fronts has the world incredibly nervous and with good reason. This could be the game changer behavior that drives people to use extensions that simply aren't traceable to a DNS query in the traditional way, or are simply part of a peer network like .bit or .onion or even something far more interesting if it ever gets created.

Re:.com is still king

[houghi]

If you tell someone to go to a website they either search, or type in the name and add .com

There are several things that go wrong.
1) People search. Many have no idea where they should enter the website name
2) People do not listen. They will add www to it no matter what I tell them to enter. Oh and don't ask me if there is a space. When I spell out something, I will TELL you if there is a space.

Re:.com is still king

[donaldm]

The fun part is .com is now understood to be .nsa.

Most URLS's are name.designation.country with many US URLS leaving off the "country" which should be us. So if you just see .com without the country you can be sure it is a "commercial US" URL. Now if you see .mil or .gov without a country code top level domain you could be forgiven for thinking it is a front for the NSA, although I think I would be a bit more worried about .xxx domains without a country designation.

For a list of top level domains the following site may be helpful although when they talk about the following ".edu", "gov" and ".mil" as USA top level domains this is right and wrong at the same time since other countries do use them followed by the country code top level domain and have been doing so for over 30 years.

Re:.com is still king

[Anonymous Coward]

...Given these factors, I would say that .com will be king, for 20 years at least.

Trying to make predictions on human behavior on the internet is pointless and for fools. 20 years ago the masses all thought AOL keywords was the only way to search. We've come a LONG way since then, along with a few game-changers along the way (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, smartphones) that change how people act and interact completely with the internet.

All it would take is another game changer to nullify your statement completely to modify behavior like this. We already don't type FQDNs in favor of being lazy and typing a single word into the search bar that is (now) built into every browser instead of having to actually go to your favorite engine search page and type it in. Yet another example of how behavior has modified itself rather quickly. How long before voice commands take over completely? You really think it's going to be 20 years before I'm just speaking a single word into a smartphone to find something? Oh wait, I forgot, we also do that today.

You make bright, salient points, which in contrary to your statements, indirectly validate the concept of .com strength.

When AOL was launched, it was "going to create a whole new internet". They had their own browser, interface, portals, etc.

Smartphones were going to replace all of that silly typing, Siri was the next generation's voice.

Facebook and Twitter did away with the need for any other way of communication, your profile was the place to be and eradicated the internet as a whole.

Every one of these were internet-killers. World changing, revolutionary, mind-numbing behavior modifiers. In the end they are all nothing next to the concept of free internet browsing, with your own browser, your own limitless mind and your exceptionally mindless searching which brings up whatever result has the most cash behind it. And since big companies (all of the examples above used .COM to make their stand), tend to stake the same horse, you will have it this way for a long time.

I am going to make one possible exception however. Govt spying on all fronts has the world incredibly nervous and with good reason. This could be the game changer behavior that drives people to use extensions that simply aren't traceable to a DNS query in the traditional way, or are simply part of a peer network like .bit or .onion or even something far more interesting if it ever gets created.

You make some strong points here, but big companies do not use .COM to "make their stand". That is an old mentality that can die because of the technology and behavior I've pointed out. If your favorite new company was a .ORG or .US, you probably wouldn't even notice it, because you and hundreds of millions of other people simply do not use FQDN anymore when looking for information. Hell, the concept of bookmarks almost killed that in itself by eliminating the need to retype your favorite URLs. How many bookmarks do you have right now that are not .COM? Did you even realize it? I didn't think so.

And to be clear, NONE of your examples were ever meant to be internet "killers". The smartphone was never meant to replace the keyboard as a whole, and hasn't even done it itself. Facebook or Twitter was never meant to replace ALL forms of communication in your life, as neither can even handle voice after years of use. They are internet enhancers that can (and did) modify behavior, and it sure as hell didn't take 20 years to do it.

ALL of this horseshit in the namespace is nothing more than unadulterated greed by Registrars and ICANN. That's it. Find the cheapest TLD you can run with, come up with a catchy yet nonsensical word (you know, like "twitter" or "instagram"), and

Re:.com is still king

[DarkTempes]

>> consider that ICANN is definitely the most inept entity in existence

I hope you meant that as hyperbole. Objectively things have gone rather well for the Internet since 1998.
Though I guess one could claim ICANN's ineffectiveness as the reason? But I would still call that effective due to results.

Re:.com is still king

[wolrahnaes]

Eh, never having a need to enter a URL manually is not really a badge of pride on a technical website. Maybe it is an indication of the type of people reading Slashdot these days, though!

What? Computers are made to automate things. That's their point, they can do repetitive things really fast and usually better than we meatbags can. Taking pride in "doing it the hard way" is just pure idiocy if the result is the same. Sometimes that's not the case, the hard way is actually better, but we're talking about URL autocomplete here. There's no fine art to domain names.

I wouldn't call it a "badge of pride" unless you were one of the people implementing the feature in the browser, but to act like not having to manually enter domain (which is very different from not being capable of doing so) is any knock against one's geekiness is just stupid.

I *can* read tcpdump verbose text output quite well and do so at least a few times a month when reasons come together to require it, but given the choice I'll always fire up Wireshark and let the computer do the work while I focus on what I'm actually trying to accomplish. Does that make me less suited for Slashdot in your opinion since I wouldn't pointlessly pick the hard way?

Re:.com is still king

[alphatel]

...Given these factors, I would say that .com will be king, for 20 years at least.

Trying to make predictions on human behavior on the internet is pointless and for fools. 20 years ago the masses all thought AOL keywords was the only way to search. We've come a LONG way since then, along with a few game-changers along the way (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, smartphones) that change how people act and interact completely with the internet.

All it would take is another game changer to nullify your statement completely to modify behavior like this. We already don't type FQDNs in favor of being lazy and typing a single word into the search bar that is (now) built into every browser instead of having to actually go to your favorite engine search page and type it in. Yet another example of how behavior has modified itself rather quickly. How long before voice commands take over completely? You really think it's going to be 20 years before I'm just speaking a single word into a smartphone to find something? Oh wait, I forgot, we also do that today.

You make bright, salient points, which in contrary to your statements, indirectly validate the concept of .com strength.

When AOL was launched, it was "going to create a whole new internet". They had their own browser, interface, portals, etc.

Smartphones were going to replace all of that silly typing, Siri was the next generation's voice.

Facebook and Twitter did away with the need for any other way of communication, your profile was the place to be and eradicated the internet as a whole.

Every one of these were internet-killers. World changing, revolutionary, mind-numbing behavior modifiers. In the end they are all nothing next to the concept of free internet browsing, with your own browser, your own limitless mind and your exceptionally mindless searching which brings up whatever result has the most cash behind it. And since big companies (all of the examples above used .COM to make their stand), tend to stake the same horse, you will have it this way for a long time.

I am going to make one possible exception however. Govt spying on all fronts has the world incredibly nervous and with good reason. This could be the game changer behavior that drives people to use extensions that simply aren't traceable to a DNS query in the traditional way, or are simply part of a peer network like .bit or .onion or even something far more interesting if it ever gets created.

You make some strong points here, but big companies do not use .COM to "make their stand". That is an old mentality that can die because of the technology and behavior I've pointed out. If your favorite new company was a .ORG or .US, you probably wouldn't even notice it, because you and hundreds of millions of other people simply do not use FQDN anymore when looking for information. Hell, the concept of bookmarks almost killed that in itself by eliminating the need to retype your favorite URLs. How many bookmarks do you have right now that are not .COM? Did you even realize it? I didn't think so.

And to be clear, NONE of your examples were ever meant to be internet "killers". The smartphone was never meant to replace the keyboard as a whole, and hasn't even done it itself. Facebook or Twitter was never meant to replace ALL forms of communication in your life, as neither can even handle voice after years of use. They are internet enhancers that can (and did) modify behavior, and it sure as hell didn't take 20 years to do it.

ALL of this horseshit in the namespace is nothing more than unadulterated greed by Registrars and ICANN. That's it. Find the cheapest TLD you can run with, come up with a catchy yet nonsensical word (you know, like "twitter"

Re:.com is still king

[mtm10]

Me thinks Lincolnshire is poking fun at his bank, not at your browser. It would seem his bankers just recently noticed these computery things

Re:.com is still king

[garyoa1]

That's out the window. There's a lot of commercial US companies that use a .ca, .co.uk., .au etc. They just go to a site that "looks" like it would be in that country. But still ship from the US. And there's also a lot of .com sites that could be from anywhere. So .com is still going to be king for a long, long time.

Re:.com is still king

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the most lamentable trends in web browsers nowadays, I think, is making it so that there is only one place to enter a query. When I enter a URL, I want it to be a URL; I do not want it to take a round trip to a search engine.

Re:.com is still king

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you get to the banks homepage in the first place (the very first time)? well, you type the address into the urlbar... or i guess you could do a search for it and hope you dont end up on a phising site.

Re: .com is still king

[runningduck]

My bank is always sending me emails with attached statements and incredible offers. I just click on the links I. The emails.

Re:.com is still king

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much automation can be a bad thing - it makes certain things less secure. I agree that it is not a badge of pride. but blindly trusting websearches to get you to the right place is certainly not not a badge of pride either. And there certainly is a "fine art to domain names" - typosquatting/phishing sites abuse it just to name a few. so for the first visit to anything that takes information from you, you should certainly manually type it (and then, sure, bookmark it) and that is not even considering any possible "no-action-beyond-visiting-the-page"-exploits.

Re:.com is still king

[TheLink]

That's because you lack imagination and keep thinking of TLDs as "Yet Another Dot Com". Just because the ICANN keeps making new alternative ".com" (to make more money?) doesn't mean TLDs have to all be like that.

Google applied for ".here". Not sure what they want it for but more than 10 years ago I proposed that ".here" be a reserved TLD for local use by anyone similar to the way the RFC1918 ip address ranges are used.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yeoh-tldhere-01

I also wrote to the ICANN to try to get it reserved. I didn't have USD100k to apply for it (in order to give it to the world). In contrast ICANN approved TLDs like .info and .biz.

Re:.com is still king

[theshowmecanuck]

With unlimited TLD's comes the ability to have unlimited sub-domains. An admittedly naive example would have someone create a malicious domain with the same sub-domain name and a site that looked like the legit one. Manipulate the search engines so that when someone does what you do, it goes to the shite site and phishes you. Oh wait, sites are already doing that but with links in emails. Just one click is good enough for them too? Now imagine orders of magnitude more opportunity to create look alike sites. And not everyone is savvy enough to notice. I'm sure there will be better less naive examples of how to exploit people who do what you do.

Re:.com is still king

[isorox]

Eh, never having a need to enter a URL manually is not really a badge of pride on a technical website. Maybe it is an indication of the type of people reading Slashdot these days, though!

Slashdot, the site that tells us Ctrl-alt-t is a miraculous newsworthy item

And editors that think Ctrl-z is undo, not suspend.

Re:.com is still king

[Aighearach]

doesn't matter what other TLDs are announced. .com is still king for consumers, anything else is a just a toy for the nerdy.

So true, if my wife tells me "foo.com" I just put "foo" into a google search because half the time it is really .tv or .th but the average non-techie mostly associates ".com" with "the internet."

Re:.com is still king

[vlueboy]

They will add www to it no matter what I tell them to enter.

They add "www" not because they are technical enough to know what it means when they see it. After all, they cannot tell you what the http and the colon and the rest are for. The US mainstream knows about the doble-u's because exactly 100% of web-savvy ads in the nineties spelled it out. Just like reading a phone # aloud, no?
It was stuff like "h.t.t.p colon slash slash w.w.w. mcdonalds dot com"
It boggles the mind that I lived through that compared to the structure-less "follow us on facebook and twitter"

Ten years ago, almost noone commercial would be risking the huge level of accidental misdirection that we all know can ensue if we say "yeah just google [my name] to find me" So I understand this parent comment

Re:.com is still king

[DrVomact]

I can't remember the last time I entered a URL manually. What is this, 1994? I often type in a single letter and the browser autocompletes it for me. If I don't know the exact URL, I type something in anyway and Google will look it up for me, at which point it will be saved in my browser history.

I guess you don't log in to your router or your WAPs to change the parameters, huh? Oh yeah, you probably set your wifi security using the button on the WAP. In fact, you're probably the guy with WEP and the default router password from which I'm leeching bandwith right now!

Re:.com is still king

[petervandervos]

Nope, you type their name in google and follow the link it gives.

Re:.com is still king

[Kalriath]

.com is a gTLD, it's not US at all. Just like .net, .org, and .xxx. None of these have country designations because they are generic. .edu, .mil and .gov are abominations (should be .edu.us, .mil.us and .gov.us like everyone else has to), but too ingrained to fix now.

Re:.com is still king

[Meski]

you start typing netba and it autocompletes to https://www.my.commbank.com.au/netbank/Logon/Logon.aspx - and then lights up in green to tell you it's got a valid ssl cert match with the site. Typing it manually... there's more likelihood you will mispell it, and end up visiting all the one letter off dodgy websites.

Re:.com is still king

[Zaelath]

Yeah, no. That's your local cache, "netba" brings up nothing in my web browser since I don't bank at the CBA...

Re:.com is still king

[Optali]

I did exactly this.
  I am very happy with my new customer support from Lagos Nigeria they are very friendly, specially Dr. Mobutu Sese Jr. (son of the latter President Mobotu Sese Seko)
There seems to be a little problem with my salary but they promised me to transfer 10.000.000USD as soon as the funds get unfrozen at their secret Swiss bank account.

Re:.com is still king

[stoatwblr]

"Lastly, consider that ICANN is definitely the most inept entity in existence."

Perhaps, but the mover and shaker behind the policy (their last chair) is now working for a registrar and has a long history of shady dealings

This isn't ineptitude. It's a cynical ploy to milk the system for all it's worth, as most large companies feel obligated to register their brandname in EVERY top level in order to defend their trademarks - ICANN doesn't benefit much but the registrars sure as hell do.

http://apple

[jpatters]

Back in 1993, if you typed the URL http://apple/ into Mosaic anywhere on the University of Vermont network, you would get a page about apple orchards. Of course, this was just UVM's DNS.

Re:http://apple

[xaxa]

Some country-code domains have their CCTLD set up as a website.

Try http://tk./ and http://dk./ for example.

Complete list of CCTLDs with A records (many more have MX records):

ac has address 193.223.78.210
ai has address 209.59.119.34
cm has address 195.24.205.60
dk has address 193.163.102.24 (and ipv6 2a01:630:0:40:b1a:b1a:2011:1)
gg has address 87.117.196.80
io has address 193.223.78.212
je has address 87.117.196.80
kh has address 203.223.32.21
pn has address 80.68.93.100
sh has address 193.223.78.211
tk has address 217.119.57.22
tm has address 193.223.78.213
to has address 216.74.32.107
uz has address 91.212.89.8
vi has address 193.0.0.198
ws has address 64.70.19.33

Re: http://apple

[jpatters]

Care to elaborate?

Or are you just talking out of your ass?

Re:http://apple

[erpbridge]

That's a valid URL, for internal to your own DNS server. If no FQDN is provided pointing it to a domain outside your own, it will try to match up that name to any A records or CNAME records that exist on your DNS.

Many organizations do this for internal webpages. http://intranet/ , http://learning/ , http://getservice/ are examples of how some companies do this. It's not the same as the Google suggestion, which is making a top level FQDN domain.

Re:http://apple

[nabsltd]

Some country-code domains have their CCTLD set up as a website.

Try http://tk./ and http://dk./ for example.

Both give me the "Firefox can't find the server at" message.

Re:http://apple

[xaxa]

tk seems a bit dodgy, but dk reliably redirects:

$ curl -I http://dk./
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:49:11 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: https://www.dk-hostmaster.dk/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

How about http://io./ , that returns 200 (no redirecting) and works fine in Opera, Chromium and Firefox on Linux for me.

$ curl -I http://io./
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:50:10 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.2 (Unix) OpenSSL/0.9.8n
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html

Re: no.maybe.yes?

[ksandom]

I'd like to have "dot". Can you imagine the confusion when people try to communicate what the URL is?

Re: no.maybe.yes?

[alphatel]

I'd like to have "dot". Can you imagine the confusion when people try to communicate what the URL is?

Or could you imagine some madman calling his site "slash" "dot", it would be twice as confusing.

answer...

[Anarchduke]

NO

branding!!

[Joining Yet Again]

competition! consumerism! capitalism! money! profit!

Humanity: having the ability but lacking the decency to just cooperate since, well, forever.

Re:branding!!

[Rockoon]

Aside from a couple of entitled *assholes, everyone co-operates and acts like there's 4 way stop sign.

I don't think the fear of wrecking your car, and sustaining possible major bodily damage, can strictly be called cooperation. A spontaneous Nash Equilibrium, sure.

Re:branding!!

[Oligonicella]

Except, that's not what motivates them.

Re:branding!!

[JesseMcDonald]

Ever been at a 4 way intersection when the stop lights are out? ..., everyone co-operates and acts like there's 4 way stop sign.

Of course they do. Legally, there is no difference. The intersection doesn't become a free-for-all just because the lights are out. If the lights are present but not working, it's considered an all-way stop, and proceeding through without stopping is no different than running a stop sign or stop light.

While this does demonstrate a degree of cooperation, it's no different than the cooperation you see at a working stop light, an intersection with stop signs, or really just about any other situation involving the rules of the road.

I do agree that humans generally prefer cooperation to conflict, all else being equal. It's the unequal cases which are interesting. Cooperation isn't always a winning strategy for the individual, or even for the group. Sometimes the majority is simply wrong, and the group is better served by testing different strategies against each other and seeing which ones actually work best.

When I look around me...

[vikingpower]

...at where the software I currently use the most comes from, the answer is clear: elasticsearch.org lucene.apache.org logstash.net julialang.org kibana.org localstre.am Right ?

http://damnit

[mitcheli]

I was so hoping for a new domain name. On the other hand, I do find it fascinating that they were able to write a 41 page paper to say "No." Touche!

Peh stupid

[Mashiki]

I know the /. crowd may or may not disagree, but it would simplify the domain system. Why can't we have a washington.dc.city or toronto.on.ca.city among others, or linux.os, or hell how about ford.car, or photoshop.app. Or Washingtonpost.news, or CBS.news. To me it makes sense as an extension of the domain system to a level that people will understand.

Bah...give it another 10 years when the net is at saturation point and we'll probably have this breakdown happen.

Re:Peh stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The domain name system is a hierarchical system of administrative authority. When you choose a domain name, you're really choosing the authority who will delegate your chosen domain name to you. To a marketer or a librarian, there may be different priorities for choosing a domain name, but the administrative authority is the only hierarchical system inherent to the domain name system. As domain names move up the ladder, from second level domains to top level domains, the hierarchy becomes flatter, but it reduces choice: You can only get a TLD from ICANN, whereas you could have gotten your second level domain from lots of registries and registrars. Reduced choice also means reduced diversity: As ICANN becomes involved in managing the interests of domain users instead of domain registries, it will have to deal with conflicts that would otherwise have been dealt with on the TLD registry level, where multiple solutions could have coexisted and competed, and ICANN will reduce that space to just one option: whatever ICANN decides. That's why it was wrong to give TLDs to anything but registries. More TLDs are good, because they could have created more choice, but nobody should have been allowed to use the new TLDs exclusively for themselves, because it moves the competition to the hierarchy level where choice doesn't exist. Operating a registry should have been the only admissible use of the new TLDs.

Re:Peh stupid

[lord_rob the only on]

city.washington.dc.us -- city.toronto.or.ca don't we already have * ENOUGH * of those names ?

Re:Peh stupid

[nurb432]

It makes no sense to the actual users. Its hard enough now to know what is real and what isn't and how to get there. Opening things up like that would just breed confusion for users. "where do i go now?"

Re:Peh stupid

[wvmarle]

That may or may not be the case for generic TLDs as you suggest.

However: who is going to control the TLDs? The summary suggests the applicant, and that's also my impression from previous such news.

Many companies will want to register their company name as TLD. So instead of google.com we now have to go to search.google or www.google. That doesn't simplify stuff. So to really simplify it, Google tried to register .search and then have it allowed to run "dotless", so just http://search./ And with so many company/brand names being regular words (apple, windows, lotus, office - just to name a few) it can just as well become a terrible mess.

Re:Peh stupid

[SuricouRaven]

First, this ruling isn't against that. This ruling only rejects dotless TLDs - things like just 'city' on it's own.

Secondly, there are always contention issues. For example, 'London.city.' I'm near London. But there's also a London, Ontario. And several Londons in the US. We've already had a dispute about the 'Amazon' TLD, because Amazon the company wants the rights but Brazil also want it as a TLD associated with the river and its basin. You gave 'app' as an example - but 'app store' is a trademark of Apple, and they might object to anyone else running the TLD .app.

Thirdly, there are political concerns. ICANN is, officially, a multinational entity independant of any government - though it's largely an open secret that they are under the de factor control of the US government. Many countries though have their own internal concerns about how they wish to regulate domain names - many conservative countries wouldn't wish to see domain names relating to pornography granted at all, for example. Some have specific words that are reserved for government use, and many countries have their own quirks - just think how Germany would react if someone wanted .nazi. So long as ICANN stays only on the safe, boring domains that isn't a problem - they just hand out a governmental TLD to each country, and stay apolitical on their own. But the more they create, the more dispute there will be - remember the fiasco of .xxx? Dragged on for years, including multible court actions and some semi-open government meddling.

Re: Peh stupid

[jon3k]

Those 13 root servers are made up of hundreds of servers which point to the gTLD servers.

Re:no.maybe.yes?

[reboot246]

I've always been in favor of having '.cum' for porn websites.

Whats the point

[rossdee]

Most of the new devices connecting to the internet these days don't have a keyboard, who's gonna type in a URL anyway.

Re:Whats the point

[thegarbz]

Yes we should just replace every website on the internet with a crappy buggy app that does nothing other than wrap some html 5 interface with part of the website content.

Re:Whats the point

[cdrudge]

You've talked to my company's IT department, haven't you!

Re: no.maybe.yes?

[wonkey_monkey]

www.uu-uu-uu.dot.org

How about just using the dot?

[LoneTech]

Dotless names are used for local hosts (and frequently other shortcuts, like ssh aliases). Many systems use the dot to decide whether to do a global DNS lookup; if there aren't enough dots in there, the local domain gets appended. It's a lot like pathnames with the slash separator, where slash in front makes it an absolute path. What most people don't realise is that there are absolute DNS names too, which end with a period. If someone were to register the "search" top level domain, the URL would look like "http://search." Including the period. On /. of all places, this ought to be known.

Re:How about just using the dot?

[SuricouRaven]

DNS is delicate.

There was an issue a couple of years ago - I can't remember the details, but it involved printers ceasing to work suddenly without cause in some businesses. Offices where they just ceased to function.

Turned out that the printers had been running a check for firmware updates on boot - they tried to reach their manufacturer server each time, but only got a NXDOMAIN, as the model was no longer supported an the update server no longer maintained. Until the day one of the major ISPs decided to spoof non-existant domains to instead point to their own advert-laden 'helpful' search page. The printers thus tried to fetch their firmware update from that page and, getting a 400 response, tried to install it - but instead it just failed checksum, causing the printers to lock up in objection.

I can't recall the details any more, but you can probably look them up with enough googling. Easily fixed once you know the problem, but it shows just how delicate name lookup can be.

How many businesses have a server somewhere called 'search?' If a 'search' TLD were registered, queries would become ambiguous and traffic ends up going to the wrong place.

Re:Devaluating .COMs favors Google

[longk]

I wonder if that's true.

For websites I don't know I always use search already. That's simply how that works.

For websites I do know I simply starting: s, l, a, s, h until my browser fetched slashdot.org from my browser history at which point I hit Enter.

Whether the website ends it .com, .org or .vague doesn't matter for my usage pattern. Am I that special?

Re: no.maybe.yes?

[only_human]

Or how about phishing and other fraud that already capitalizes on people being mistaken about what the URL is.
Making URL recognition worse... ah NO.

Re:distributing a hosts file

[ami.one]

I have heard this many times but I am able to regularly edit the hosts file just fine on Windows 8. (I edit it for easy ssh and because I use cntlm in office sometimes) Its just that I need to copy it somewhere, edit, save and then copy it back and give permission to overwrite.

Re:Why Isn't Apple Suing

[longk]

Just because Google applied for .app doesn't mean they'll get it. I'm pretty sure Apple and a ton of other companies also applied for it.

What about the existing dotless sites?

[dmesg0]

E.g. http://uz
Will they have to disable it?

Re:What about the existing dotless sites?

[Krenair]

That URI works fine for me in Chrome at the moment.

Re:What about the existing dotless sites?

[Krenair]

More complete list here: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hoffine-already-dotless-02#section-2

Re:What about the existing dotless sites?

[jon3k]

Doesn't work for me (Chrome Version 29.0.1547.57 m)

Re:What about the existing dotless sites?

[thegarbz]

This has more to do with the way you set up your network. The default action for a dotless domain should be to append a DNS suffix in relation to the local network. This can either be done by the OS or by an internal DNS server. When I type http://uz/ I get an error because the server uz.myhomenetwork.com is not a valid domain.

If however I type http://uz./ it directs me to the correct Russian site as the dot unambiguously directs the OS to look up the record without a DNS suffix.

This has nothing to do with Chrome.

Re:What about the existing dotless sites?

[thegarbz]

They effectively have as they are unreachable by a properly setup network which would respond to that request by appending the local DNS suffix. In an out of the box Linux install you end up trying to connect to uz.localhost which doesn't get you very far.

Re:What about the existing dotless sites?

[thegarbz]

Eh that should have said localdomain

Re:What about the existing dotless sites?

[CoolGopher]

Any name specified with a trailing dot will not have a local domain or search domain appended.

Re:What about the existing dotless sites?

[thegarbz]

Yes my point exactly. The trailing dot is absolute. Omission of the trailing dot however results in exactly what this thread is about, that some people can reach http://uz/ and other's can not.

Re:What about the existing dotless sites?

[jrumney]

It also doesn't work for me, as my local DNS server correctly rejects it. Using Google's DNS server and the domain root dot, I can see that it actually exists.

Re:no.maybe.yes?

[pipatron]

You mean because women don't get orgasms?

hrm.

[berchca]

It strikes me as ironic that the company who has marginalized domain names is trying to hoard a bunch of TLDs.

(I mean, do you ever type in 'thingiwant.com,' or do you just toss 'thing I want' in the Google bar?)

Re: no.maybe.yes?

[Somebody Is Using My]

I want this domain:

DotDashDash-Dash-DotDotDashDot.Dot

(yes, it's basically the Slashdot domain joke on steroids)

Google profits from TLD confusion

[CODiNE]

After all with hundreds of TLDs added, who can remember where anything is at? Guess I'll have to google it.

Re: no.maybe.yes?

[mtm10]

Perhaps you are looking for: DotDotDot-DotDashDotDot-DotDash-DotDotDot-DotDotDotDot-DashDotDot-DashDashDash-Dash ...? Running your domain through my 1870 reader gets me W-T-F.E

Local networks

[spikesahead]

Computers currently use the dot in a domain name to determine whether the machine is on the local network or not.

What if I made my machine name 'search''? Would I get all the traffic intended for the 'search' dotless domain? Would people be unable to resolve via my hostname at all, getting google whenever they tried to get to me?

router

[drmpeg]

The name of the host at 31.13.39.250 is just "router".

The hierarchy works. mostly.

[bussdriver]

Toronto.ON.CA should work today, the CA TLD is to blame. .city would be stupid which is why ICANN shouldn't be idiotically opening up TLDs to anybody with the cash.

Operating a registry should have been the only admissible use of the new TLDs. ICANN is screwing everything up now; time for the U.N. to take over. If I had the cash, I'd buy .USA and then proceed to spoof the .us domains... and .MS or .Microsoft or .Microsott ....

Re:The hierarchy works. mostly.

[bussdriver]

CA TLD is an example TLD. It is in charge of .ca, it decides who and how it's subdomains are managed. It can sell them off like an anarchist or it can manage them all with an iron fist. That includes dictating how the lower domains like .bc or .qc are to be run (if not running them itself.) Each nation can do it's own thing. .US and the non-country TLDs are the same thing-- they are the responsibility and fault of the US Dept of Commerce.

The U.N. should take over and the USA deserves the right to not need .US as a TLD because we invented it all-- just as the British are the only ones not required to put "UK" on their postage stamps. It won't stop idiotic TLDs because the USA will still have control of those (but they should ban the USA from having any 2 letter TLDs... or non-ascii chars...) The U.N. would also likely allow aliases so .uk or .cn work and allow unicode versions of nations so the Chinese can use Chinese to write "China." I only speak english but I'm not one of those asshats who think the world must use my language to operate a computer.

Dotless domain support.

[Animats]

I thought dotless domains were coming, and put full support for dotless domains in SiteTruth.

There was a long discussion of this on the Mozilla developers mailing list. There are some dotless domains right now. A few country codes will resolve to an IP address, and one or two actually have a web site there. Try ac

A lot of software, some of it very low level, mishandles dotless domains. If you look up "ac" in DNS, you'll get a valid IP address. Browsers, though, usually try using it as a search keyword, or try it with ".com" suffixed. There was a concern that if every word typed into a browser's input box had to be checked for being a TLD domain name, it would overload the root servers and delay search responses. DNS TLD "no finds" are relatively expensive operations.

Down at the "getaddrinfo()" level, there's a known bug. There's an exploit for this that drives traffic to subdomains of "com.com", which is set up so that all subdomains of .com.com" are full of ad pages. Right now this is just annoying, but it could be exploited in more ways if single-component domain names became popular. That's really hard to fix, because it's in the C library on most machines. Applications would have to be rebuilt.

If you put a "." at the end of a domain name, it's "rooted", and local lookups on your local network do not apply. Type "ac." into your browser's input box, and you'll get some domain registrar who bought the Ascension Island TLD.

ICANN actually did something right.

The death of domain names

[drstevep]

TLDs are a thing of the past, or will be. The TLD explosion will hasten that.

Remember the early days of ebay? How you could peruse ALL of the new postings for a day in "computer hardware" (one single category) in ten minutes? Yes, you would go to computer>hardware to get to the category, and that's what you did.

Now ebay has been overrun by online stores and bulk postings, a single ID posting hundreds or more items per day. A virtual online catalog for thousands of sale-by-the-shovel retailers. And everything is found via search. (Hey, try posting computer hardware in "dolls". People will find it and it'll sell for the same price you'd get elsewhere.)

This is the future of domain names. You search by company name in the address field, it goes where you want to, your browser/search engine learn your preferences. In five years, no one will care if you are prostitutes-international.xxx or im.a.who.re !